Shortly before I met Leonard, his mother died. I joined a new law firm where he worked, a union-side law firm, and Len was a grizzled veteran of the place. It should not be a surprise, I suppose, but it was only later on that I learned how close he was to his mother. After getting to know him better and having become fond of him, one evening we were well into our cups when he began talking about his mother very tenderly. It seems that, before she died, she elicited a promise from Len that he would visit her grave, and that it would show signs of being visited, and cared for. You know the signs; the flowers tended to, stones placed on the gravestone. But Len lived in Toronto and his mother was buried in Montreal, and while he could get the flowers tended to, he couldn’t visit her grave often. It weighed on him.
Cool as a cucumber
My father, Daniel Bate Boerop, was born in 1931 and was a boy when Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Netherlands during World War II. Despite his youth, he got involved with a Resistance cell in his hometown of Utrecht, attending meetings, making plans, and carrying out, in secret, acts of resistance both great and small.
Escritoire
A postcard from a time where my working life was ahead of me and where everything felt new.
A Difficult Transition
I am an actor. I am a socialist. A few years ago, I was privileged enough to combine both of these hobbies (it is very difficult to practice either acting or socialism as a profession in New Brunswick) in a performance of the one-man show Marx in Soho, written by the late historian Howard Zinn, in which the actor gets to perform the role of Karl Marx for an hour and a half on stage.
Esprit du Décaméron
En 1348, la ville de Florence en Italie est ravagée par la peste noire. Un groupe de jeunes gens de la haute société décident de fuir, et grâce à leurs moyens, se retrouvent dans un demeure isolée. Les sept femmes et trois hommes instaurent des règles du jeu: chacun doit partager une histoire sur un thème donné, et ce à tous les jours.
Spirit of the Decameron
In 1348, the city of Florence in Italy is devastated by the Black Death. A group of young people from high society decide to flee and, thanks to their means, find themselves in an isolated house outside of the city. The seven women and three men adopt a set of rules: each person will tell a story on a given theme, every single day.
Perhaps this is our Decameron
We are all in our own form of isolation from the plague; perhaps this is our Decameron. The rapidity of events makes it difficult to reflect. Although COVID-19 has been present elsewhere for some time, its presence has manifested most acutely in this neck of the woods in March. If we measure time by the government response to the pandemic, we have the following: On March 11, 2020 the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.